The layout of your landing page is very important in order to keep your visitors there and encourage them to navigate deeper into your retail site and eventually make a purchase.

Individual landing pages should be created and designed with the aim of making the site as easy to use as possible for your users. The easier the site is to use the more likely they are to proceed with the site and get to the buying stage.

Making your retail site easy to use will involve including your sales messages in areas of the page where they are most visible to the user. Where you decide to put key links and sales messages is crucial to success with your website.

These heatmaps from eye tracking studies to see where users’ eyes are attracted to highlights how people always tend to focus on the main body of text and don’t really stray away from that.

This habit of internet users demonstrates how it is often difficult for banner advertising to be successful as they usually appear on the right hand side of the page or along the top – as highlighted in green in the heatmaps.

This problem also needs to be considered when creating landing pages for campaigns. If you put your sales messages in the areas of the page where they will be missed by users, you will be losing out on precious conversions.

It is essential that users cannot miss links to pages you want them to navigate to. Everything you want your visitors to see and all calls to action should be included in the main body of text - this will guide your visitors through your retail site and lead them to buying your products.

To find out how Motive can ensure you are optimising the conversion capability of your landing pages, talk to our E-commerce Experts.

When it comes to PPC advertising, it is crucial to achieve a high Quality Score for your adverts. The Quality Score Google assigns your keywords affects several aspects of your advertising campaign, including; how much you pay per click, if your advert shows and if it does, in what position it appears.

Google assigns a Quality Score to each keyword in your campaign. The Quality Score ranges from; Poor, OK, Good to Great.

There are various factors that affect the Quality Score of your keywords. These include the historical click through rate of your adverts, the keywords relevance to the adverts you are running and the content quality of your landing page – i.e how many times your chosen keywords are appearing in the text on your landing page.

A recent addition to how Google calculates your overall Quality Score is the time it takes your landing page to load. This hasn’t been widely publicised and many advertisers are probably unaware that this is now an important factor in the Quality Score.

There are various ways of improving the load time of your landing page. These include:

• Avoiding the use of redirects
• Keeping the page size as small as possible
• Compressing images to reduce the file size
• Keeping the use of flash to a minimum
• Not having third party content on the page

To find out more about optimising your website to assist your PPC campaigns, speak to our Marketing Team.